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Weight loss – Key steps to achieving it

14th August 2017

personal trainer

What are the key steps to achieving Weight Loss?

Open the newspaper or switch on the TV, and you will find that you are constantly being promoted high fat, high sugar, or high salt foods that don’t support a healthy lifestyle. As a marker to determine whether their advertising is working, all you need to do is look at the waist size of the average UK person to see that promoting these foods is definitely working. Britain is the fattest nation in Europe, and cardiovascular disease, is one of the biggest killers in the UK.

Don’t be sold into eating junk food

Our marketing experts know that everything starts with the mind and they have become really successful at promoting things to us that we never thought we would ever consume. They start at a very early age to convince us that certain brands are connected with pleasurable food. For example, they have sold us the idea that drinking energy drinks is a good thing. Energy drinks are basically metallic tubes of caffeine and other substances.

Aside from being unhealthy and overpriced, they taste terrible. To sell this to us, they realised that if they paired their product with people performing incredible feats of athleticism, we would associate these products with heightened masculinity and a superhuman level of energy. They have proved this has worked because the energy drink industry is now worth billions.

Marketers increasing knowledge of behavioural psychology has given them the understanding of how to conditioning us to have an emotional response when we see certain brands.

The top food companies are spending so much more money on advertising highly processed junk food. The messages they have reinforced in our thinking takes a lot of effort to change, because we now associate certain brands with a positive emotion, which of course is not logical. So, you can talk till you are blue on the amount of saturated fat there is in a fast-food meal, but this will not convince someone who is emotionally connected with the food they are eating. This has been done with multiplied billions in advertising spending.

Choose healthier options

In comparison, the government has tried really hard to encourage others to eat their 5-a-day. This has been done with millions in government spending. As you can see, the difference is very strong. The government cannot keep pace with spending in this sector, and this is definitely being proven with amount of overweight and obese people we have.

Sugar and Fat makes us fatter

Certain brands evoke emotions of pleasure, that bypass our rational minds. This is very different from enjoying a brand just because of how it tastes. This is very well highlighted by the countless blind tests that have taken place to determine how we rate brands by taste alone. The top brands seldom come up on top. So more and more, we are seeing our supermarket shelves stacked with products with high quality packaging and low quality materials. Just look at the ingredients list of any packaged product and you will see wheat and sugar near the top of the list. This of course benefits the top food brands because sugar and wheat are very low priced commodities because they are so intensively grown.

Final thoughts

To achieve long-term weight loss, you will need to widen your palate by experimenting with a wider range of flavours than you are typically used to. Highly processed Wheat and sugar definitely taste nice, but they are high in calories and are not helping you towards your health and wellness goals. Why not try a new fruit or vegetable today?